Shirin

[foggy eyes]

Bordwell loves it.

I can't wait.

[Nothing]

Hardly an original idea (the afforementioned Vivre sa Vie, Goodbye Dragon Inn, Fantasma). Having read the review, there seems little extra benefit in actually watching it.

Kiarostami is such a flake.

[foggy eyes]

Hardly an original idea (the aforementioned [...] Goodbye Dragon Inn, Fantasma).

Alonso is immune from this criticism?

[Nothing]

I haven't seen Fantasma. It seems to promise more than this Kiaromstami piece, however, being more than just a pure concept. In a more general sense, I find the liberal deification of Kiarostami (and Panahi and others) to be morally hypocritical.

[ellipsis7]

SHIRIN sounds amazing.... Dying to see it... There is an evolution of some of the central ideas through Kiarostami's previous TA'ZIYEH installation, as I have written...

His video installation based round the traditional Iranian drama TAZIYEH, which depicts the martyrdom of the Imam Hossain, is played out in mannered fashion (the bad guy dressed in red, the good in green, an actor appearing in lion costume, and copious rich red paint doubling for blood). This drama he places on a central plasma screen, but as it is played out, we simultaneously watch above on two large projected screens, images of the ordinary men and woman in the Iranian audience. Kiarostami has cited the influence of the TAZIYEH (rather than Brecht) on his use of distancing techniques in his cinema, but in the installation we also see a remarkable and pure manifestation of Aristotleian dramatic progression, as registered on the faces of the audience, through from initial engagement and mimesis, to emotional upset and catharsis. We see them chatter and drinking tea, then their growing interest and identification, fast followed by silence and rapt attention, developing finally into anguish and tears. It was simple but stunning.

...
....to FIVE DEDICATED TO OZU....

So in FIVE (2003), ‘Five long takes dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu’, there is no narrative progression, no mimetic character portrayal, only a piece of wood on a shoreline of the Caspian Sea, a seaside promenade, dogs and ducks on the beach, and frogs in a pool, croaking their way through a moonlit and rainy night towards rebirth of the day and the calm bright light of morning. The statically shot sequences vary from the unmediated to the heavily manipulated, but despite the excision of so many elements, there is still pure sound and image, and out of this cinema, shorn of plot and characters, there remains transformation and transition. Where the prose is slowed to a standstill emerges poetry, simple and undirected.

...and his WHERE IS MY ROMEO? segment of CHACUN SON CINEMA (as DB notes) - which can be glimpsed here...

As DB writes...

Abbas Kiarostami has the widest octave range of any filmmaker I know.... Indeed, I think that one of the great accomplishments of much modern Iranian cinema, with Kiarostami in the vanguard, has been to reintroduce classic dramatic suspense into arthouse moviemaking.

So true!... AK is engaged in a fundamental exploration of cinematic Narrative Structure, finding and extending classical models in new settings...

[zedz]

Based on your description of the Ta'ziyeh installation, Shirin is a reduction of that (we don't see the film being watched, we only hear it; the range of actions within the audience and the audience itself is reduced - it's mixed gender, but only women are afforded close-ups) and an expansion of 'Where Is My Romeo?' (very similar form extended to feature length). It's an art installation that needs to be installed and viewed in a movie theatre. It's not so directly related to Five, which seems to me more closely akin to his other 'landscape' films (10 on 10, Roads of Kiarostami). The focus on narrative and human faces in the former works amounts to a big difference in effect for me.

[ellipsis7]

With FIVE, it can be considered that we the audience are the 'human faces', so the process happens inside us the viewers, constructing what form, drama or poetry there is in the film inside our own individual minds from the minimalist material on the screen... And indeed the brain does still tend to residually emote at, identify with, and interpret - despite the stripped down nature of FIVE - in an Aristotleian sense...

A version of AK's TA'ZIYEH, staged in Italy, where the performance is live, while the previously recorded audience shots are on the big screens...

[ellipsis7]

An interesting and timely piece from David Parkinson at guardian.co.uk...

Iran's women face the camera - As images of Neda Agha Soltan's lifeless face circumvent the globe, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has made a compelling study of the female face with Shirin

[Nothing]

Except that Kiarostami has worked within (and tacitly supported) the Iranian system for his entire career. How about an article on Ghobadi, recently imprisoned for 'severe criticism' of the government, instead?

[Cde.]

There's no Bahman Ghobadi film opening in the UK at the moment for them to ever so neatly tie in to a widely circulated image.

[ellipsis7]

Except that Kiarostami has worked within (and tacitly supported) the Iranian system for his entire career. How about an article on Ghobadi, recently imprisoned for 'severe criticism' of the government, instead?

I wouldn't say that at all - Kiarostami has indeed worked in his home country Iran before and after the revolution, but has not supported any regime particularly - he's an artist, not a prophet or politician... He also spends quite a lot of time living in Paris... I have published this elsewhere previously...

Kiarostami’s immediate post-revolutionary films (shorts and one hour pieces), feature intriguing strategies which would be subversive, if only he was interested in something as direct as a political response. In the wake of revolutionary chaos and turmoil, TOOTHACHE (1980) is a bizarre gem focussing on the subject of dental hygiene, while the probing masterwork ORDERLY AND DISORDERLY (1981), uses self-reflexivity and repetition to interrogate order and disorder and the ability to engineer both. While SOLUTION (1978) bursts unexpectedly into an unfettered celebration of freedom and nature, out of the story of a man seeking to return with his puncture repaired tyre to his abandoned car.

Longer pieces CASE NO 1 NO 2 (1979) features disruption in a school classroom and seven students suspended for a week by the teacher, because no one will own up. Adults, including parents, educational experts, tv pundits, mullahs and government ministers, wrangle over the nature of rebellion and resolution, issues of honesty, discipline, solidarity and betrayal. The prevailing thought is to recommend that the students should stick to their guns and stay silent, and even suggests a form of re-education for the teacher. The sore memory of the Shah’s secret police is raw and recent. A wily Ayatollah judge from the revolutionary religious courts opines that the pupils may have held out for a greater good for the full seven days, but when they are readmitted to the classroom, they will have changed nothing, as the system and the teacher and they themselves remain just as before. Finally FELLOW CITIZEN (1983), with a foretaste of 10, intriguingly spends an hour focussing on the heated conversations of a harassed traffic warden and the motorists who are trying to gain access to a restricted traffic zone. In a theocracy that bans exposure of the human body, irate hospital bound drivers are shown waving chest x-rays under the nose of the put upon public official!

Ghobadi is a Kurdish Iranian director, which introduces separate additional issues in respect of any central Iranian government... I believe however the film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (who featured in CLOSE UP) has been appointed a spokesman for Moussavi's campaign abroad (but as Barack Obama says there's not much essential difference between Ahmadinejad and Moussavi, as the latter was prominent under Ayatollah Khomeini). Makhmalbaf has his own path to political awareness (including facilitating his wife and daughters' filmmaking careers)...

A Moment of Innocence
Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum
From the Chicago Reader

This 1996 film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf is one of his most seminal and accessible--a reconstruction of a pivotal incident during his teens that landed him in prison for several years during the shah's regime. A fundamentalist and activist at the time, Makhmalbaf stabbed a policeman; as a consequence he was shot and arrested. Two decades later, while auditioning people to appear in his film Salaam Cinema, he encountered the same policeman, now unemployed, and the two wound up collaborating on this film about the incident involving them, trying (with separate cameras) to reconcile their versions of what happened. Though no doubt prompted in part by Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990), this is a fascinating humanist experiment and investigation in its own right, full of warmth and humor as well as mystery. The original Persian title, incidentally, translates as "Bread and Flower."

[thirtyframesasecond]

Shirin has just been released in the UK, showing at the BFI Southbank and Barbican Cinemas.

Although some have mentioned in the thread that it develops themes and artistic ideas that Kiarostami's pursued over recent projects, I've not seen these, so I'm coming to the premise of watching the audience watch the "film" afresh. I wonder whether like Ten, Shirin subtly observes the role and standing of women in contemporary Iran, even through the activity of merely watching a film. Women and Iranian cinema has always been something of a peculiarity, given the perception most have of how women participate in a patriarchal society. It's the most fertile environment for female film makers to work in. In a society where women "cover up", Kiarostami shows their faces; our understanding of the "film" emerges from their faces; their gestures, how they react etc. Did I even notice a couple of women minus headscarves - as though this is the only place they can remove the headscarf? There's other small details; was that Homayoun Ershadi from Taste of Cherry? One woman had a very notable bandaged nose. And what of the fable itself? An indictment of a tyrannical society run by men? It could mean all or none of these things. There's much to look into though. Very impressed, though it naturally had a few walk outs today.